


Softer

by VastDerp



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Hand Kink, Intimacy, M/M, relationship dynamics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-28
Updated: 2011-05-28
Packaged: 2017-10-19 20:59:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/205140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/VastDerp/pseuds/VastDerp
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karkat: Poke at intimacy with a stick.</p><p>Sollux: have really nice hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Softer

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you are definitely not the touchy-feely type.

And yet here you both are, mostly without clothes unless you count your pants still technically being on, or the fact that you are both up to your goddamn nooks in Feferi’s goddamn plush cuttlefish, tangled in a gawky heap of arms and legs. Snuggling with goddamn Captor.

Again.

Times like this, you try to tell yourself it’s just part of the deal. Whatever this is you have going with Sollux, it can get a little freaky sometimes, yeah, but you knew what you were getting into before you signed up to play his bipolar psycho Mystery Quadrant Hopping game. You were warned by multiple sources. Terezi has developed a completely irritating habit of pointing this out to you whenever your conversations drift Appleberry Blast-ward (which they do pretty much every time you talk, lately).

“I warned you about Sollux,” she says, over and over again. “I told you, bro.” And she fucking laughs and you feel like a total piece of shit because she’s right. Stupid fucking memes aside, she _did_ tell you. Past you. Who is notorious for being wrong about everything.

You make a mental note to ban her from talking to the humans once you figure out how to get the fuck out from under this pile of needy douche. It was bad enough talking to her _before_ she started puking up human in-jokes along with her admittedly amusing relationship advice. You start to wonder whether this is the kind of hate that can go somewhere, but then back in the real world there are all these long cool fingers sliding down the open front of your pants and oh goddamn it _here we go again_.

The shit you put up with from this guy.

It’s not that he’s running you ragged, exactly. There have been times in your long and colorful history where you’ve had to lock his manic ass out of your room just to get a full night’s sleep. Then two days later you’d come over to his place and see him poking at some code in slow-motion with that look on his face, and you’d go in for a kiss and he’d just stare at you like you were Eridan or something and just ignore you for a week and you’d go from _please let me come up for air_ to wanting to rip _his_ clothes off for a change just to wipe that look off his face and make him say something.

Which you never actually did, because it just seemed like crossing a line, somehow. Instead you’d play lusus until you were sure he was safe and go to Terezi because at least she noticed you were alive and wouldn’t just take whatever you dished out like a kicked woofbeast when you lost your temper all over the place. Which was often.

So yeah, it was never what you expected, but you always came back. And you never really minded too much that you couldn’t define what you had going, or the way it fucked with all your other relationships. Like Terezi said, you were warned.

But this. This is just unbearable.

Since he was blinded, all he wants to do is touch you and it’s starting to seriously freak you out in a way the mood swings, bruises and endless bickering never did.

Because now he’s just _calm_.

It is the strangest goddamn thing you have ever experienced and you are so hard right now you have to think about Zahhak’s poster collection to stop from going off right there in your jeans.

He tilts his head up, not seeing you but wanting you to know he’s paying attention. “Feels different,” he says. “Softer.”

“Oh fucking THANKS.” you snarl, and he just shakes his head and brushes the tip with his thumb. You take a breath to continue the sentiment and defend your virility, but lose your train of thought (and the breath that was trying to come out as a groan) when he gives the head of your dick a playful tap. What the fuck.

“No, you moron. I meant the skin. I never noticed how nice it was before. All thin and hot and smooth.” One finger slowly strokes you, from tip to base and back, and your skin jumps under its touch.

“Because you were too busy molesting me.” _At least some things never change._

“Yeah.” he stops stroking for a moment, and that pisses you off even more than when he started. His right hand, pillowed on plush cuttlefish behind your head, leaves your hair where it was twined in a sweaty fist, comes slipping down the back of your neck in a gentle motion that makes you shiver under the faint trace of his short nails. His arm is now around your shoulders, and you are pulled closer to him without a word of protest. He lays his head carefully against your shoulder and draws a lazy circle on your chest with one finger, barely touching, and it tickles.

How does something like this even happen?

His breath is warm and sweet and his lips are soft against your neck and he is completely relaxed. And that’s the weirdest thing so far, how close and wrong and nice he is when his eyes are gone and his teeth are all broken and he should be bugshit insane and flipping his lid all over the place, but instead all he’s doing is smiling, a little, at the feel of your bumpy skin under his fingertip. Like nothing ever went wrong and he’s flushed for you, although you both know damn well that’s not quite it either. Nothing's ever simple with him; that would be too fucking easy.

“Are you cold?” he asks, as if he himself didn’t take your shirt off and fling it randomly behind him, along with his own shirt. And pants.

“N-no.” And goddamn it you did _not_ just stutter. you did _not._ “When did you turn into a complete spaz?”

This close, you can see a muscle in his forehead twitch, but you know better by now than to expect him to snap into a rant about what an ungrateful asshole you are when you know damn well no one else will give your nubby ass the time of day.

“I like it,” is all he says, breath tickly-hot across your chin as he tilts his head upward to look blindly in your face. “I have to learn to see like this either way, so I’m skipping to the good part and you can just blow me if you don’t like it.”

Your skin raises in bumps again. “Don’t think I won’t.”

“All in good time.” Two fingers are curled around your shaft, barely squeezing. One thumb is tracing the of the head with slow delicate revolutions, giving you just enough pressure to keep you up but not enough to escalate. You try to buck into it and the smug asshole stops what he’s doing and pulls away instead.

“Oh, come the fuck _on._ ” you complain, realizing he has no intention of letting you participate in this. “At least let me do something for you.”

“It’s not a race,” he informs you, and runs his tongue from your shoulder to that sensitive spot behind your ear, ending it with a nip on the earlobe that makes you bite back a groan. There’s no hiding the way your breath is coming a little faster. And of course he’s paying attention. Sollux is a workaholic and you’re his new favorite project.

But he’s not a complete monster. The hand in your pants has started exploring again, petting you all over with more pressure than before, and the hand on your chest is tracing little patterns on your skin. The combination is, you can’t deny it, pretty fucking amazing. You watch him stroke your chest and wonder if he’s writing something. If so, you can’t read it.

“How’s that?”

“Insufferable.” you tell him, and your voice quavers.

“Great,” he says, and swirls his fingers around on your chest. They’re long and thin and his fingernails aren’t even really claws. Years of living in front of a keyboard have probably rounded them off. Or maybe he clips them. He’s never been much of a troll, you have to admit.

Maybe that’s why the two of you started this in the first place. Some mutant solidarity thing full of projected self-loathing and hormones. Who the fuck knows anymore. You’re only the master of romantic advice when it applies to the lucky assholes who aren’t personally involved with the flaming ball of chaos that is Sollux fucking Captor.

How much did you ever notice about his hands before tonight? You try to remember. You’ve seen them in fists when he’s tried (and failed) to kick your ass without any supernatural cheating. You’ve seen them shaking and limp when he’s off the other end of the scale, all out of words and empty. You’ve seen them covered in blood three times. Once maroon, once yellow right after that when shit got _really_ bad.

And that time he died.

But thinking about that makes you want to kiss him and the sheer neediness would probably make your overheated thinkpan completely explode, so instead you return to the old standby that more or less defined the relationship before he went blind: endless fucking competition.

Your own hands are blunt and square, all knuckles and tiny scars from fucking around with your sickle in the privacy of your own room. Your fingers are short and clumsy and strong. They’re not pretty, but they don’t look fragile either. This puts you ahead by one step.

You pride yourself in your calloused palms and sharp claws. They’re proper troll hands. Sollux doesn’t have any marks on his hands at all. They’re just smooth and sort of shapely. When he arches the fingers they make graceful curves over your skin, like he’s playing some delicate instrument and not just running his hands over your body to make you shiver. You are finding out right now that those hands are damn skilled at making your body feel good. You don’t want to say they’re _elegant,_ because he’d laugh, but you finally accept that he can’t hear you thinking it.

Those smooth fingertips curl under your jaw and when he turns your head to put you face-to-face again, you don’t resist it. Does that put him ahead of you? You aren’t sure who’s winning here anymore. It’s all a tangled mess of awkwardness and embarrassment. You shouldn’t have to be doing this nervous virgin thing again, it was bad enough having _one_ first time. With all the things you’ve done and had done to you since then, you have no business being shy with him. But your face is hot and something low in your belly has gone incredibly tight and warm, just from being touched.

He nuzzles his face against your cheek, and you want to pull away but his fingers press into your jaw and hold you there. “Your face is really burning up.”

“I have douchebag fever,” you tell the creepy black voids that should be his eyes.

“You’re flustered.” he teases you, and follows up on this with a firm squeeze down below that knocks the wind out of you. "That's so sweet."

“Ahh. No I’m not. I’m pissed off.” You can’t keep the tremor out of your voice. _Sweet?_ What the fuck.

“Mm-hmm.” he hums into your neck. “What else is new.”

“This urge to throttle you, for one th--” And that’s all you get out before he wraps those cool pale fingers around your mouth and muffles the threats and insults into a nasal snarl. Like hushing a noisy pet. _Okay, that’s it,_ you think, and wrestle your lips open and pull his fingers into your mouth, thinking you’re going to bite the fucking things to the bone and he’s going to deserve it, but you can’t go through with it.

For a moment you’re stuck with a mouthful of smooth fingers to match the set currently jacking you off, and you feel incredibly stupid because _now what do I do with them_ and finally you decide to suck on them. Maybe you can remind him that you have more uses than as a goddamn living tactile playground for the newly blinded and perpetually horny. Your tongue explores his skin, and he’s right, the skin _is_ different from other parts of him you’ve had in your mouth, and holy shit you’re so hard it hurts right now.

“That’s nice,” he breathes into your hair, and licks your left horn. “That’s really nice.” No matter what you do today, he keeps getting the upper hand. So to speak.

His fingers taste sweet and salty, like your sweat and soap and honey all mixed together.

You know he used to bite his nails bloody, which was pretty disgusting, but he hasn’t done that for sweeps. You realize you don’t actually know how he managed to break the habit, or why he always gnawed on the left one, but never touched the right. All these things you suddenly don’t know about him add to your confusion, and you wonder how much he is just starting to notice about you. Maybe that’s why he keeps dragging you in here like this. To find out what you both missed.

You almost wrestle your hands free, one from behind his back and the other balled in a tense fist under the top stratus of the stuffed cuttlefish pile, to cup his face, and then you don’t. It’s too much. Just what’s going on in your head is strange enough without making this any more naked and desperate. You’re overwhelmed enough and all he’s doing is the most vanilla handjob you’ve ever had, but it's driving you crazier than you've ever felt. You've lost your control over the situation with him before, but this is different. Anything could happen.

You scrape a fang along the back of one knuckle and finally get a gasp out of him. You bet the Mage of Headgames is hard as a rock right now, cool facade or not, but he’s got one or your hands trapped and if you reach with the other he will feel you shift and be expecting it.

So much stuff you never noticed before. It’s like you both got lost in a red-and-blue whirlwind of sex and need and resentment, and now it’s over and you don’t know where it’s left you. Is he even Sollux anymore, without that hissy little lisp that used to drive you into rages? You don’t know. How much of what you liked (hated? pitied?) about him is still in there? It’s your job to be in control of these things, his insubordination notwithstanding. You’re the leader. It’s you.

He withdraws his fingers from your mouth and runs his index finger along your lips, moistening them with a gentle brush of skin over skin, and you feel something twist in your gut. You want to hate him a little for having such soft hands without a single mark on them, for not taking you hard and fast and impersonal, for not rising to your taunts, and you come close to opening your mouth to say something pompous to drive away this awful naked feeling, but then you don’t.

Because he’s smiling and running his wet fingers down your trembling throat, over the frantic pulse of your chest, jostling you as his arm moves behind your head. Delicate little lines trace over you and go cold in the air to leave your skin shivery and craving more and this is all just too fucking _weird_.

“You’re getting really fit,” he observes under his breath, and squeezes you in his other hand. “I like all this muscle tone.” He gives your shoulder a lick and you think about Terezi and wonder for a split second what it would be like to have both of them on you at the same time. You twitch in his grip and almost come again before you finally remember how to handle these little moments.

“It’s called going outside, fuckhead. You should try it sometime.” you say, and nip his ear a little too hard. He responds by thumbing your tip with a roughness that approaches the good old days, but it’s halfhearted. This is another way that things will never be the same between you, and suddenly you wish he had more hands and all of them on you.

“Sure, KK.” And he still uses your stupid nickname, even now that everything is just so different and you’re not really sure who this guy is anymore, exactly. This is all wrong. He should be spitting mangled insults in your face and jacking you off like he thinks he’ll get a prize for starting a pants fire. He should be hiding in a corner playing stupid video games and refusing to eat and letting you kick him while he’s down so you’ll feel better about the inevitable apology sex later.

There was no time for ogling his stupid long narrow fingers then. It was all primal and aggressive, the way you both needed it, none of this awkward slow petting or the way you keep wondering how he’s actually feeling under the mask. None of this worrying that both of you are going to die before you find out what all this stumbling around is even good for.

It can’t just be about a hard-on forever, can it?

You should be bent over a table right now pretending you hate him just as much as he pretends to hate you, gasping and calling names and biting while he basically does to you what life has been doing to both of you since you were hatched, except in a literal sense. You always liked the way he would fuck the metaphors right out of you when his brain was flipped to full-on psycho mode, but those days are gone now and you don’t know what to do about it. You needed the games and the fighting and the constant threat underlying every touch you ever exchanged. You liked it.

That’s over now. He’s blind and you’re a failure in a null session that should have been epic and this is all your fault and that means the least you can do is humor this bizarre quest to know what every inch of you feels and tastes like in slow motion. Nothing you say will put things back the way they were. It’s all your fault he’s like this. The fucking horrible part is that you kind of like him _this_ way, too.

A little.

This minor internal admission coincides with a particularly gentle fist wrapping itself around your dick, and you can’t stifle this ragged little gasp right in his empty hollow-eyed douchebag face. He’s done torturing you, finally. Thank god.

“You like that?” he asks. “Should I do it harder?”

“Fuck you. I should kick you out of here for using me as your test subject--”

“Oh shut up.” Goddamn, that empty voice. You can hear his stupid hand-me-down d00med typing quirk in everything he says. “Harder, yeah. And faster, I’m almost there.”

And the smug asshole _lightens up_ and starts to flog you at half the speed instead. You actually want to kill him now and you can feel your teeth just aching to bite the shit out of his neck but instead of attacking him you snarl out his name because he has found this one particular spot under the head of your dick that feels the best and keeps massaging it between strokes. He’s so tuned into you right now that you don’t even have to make a sound to let him know he’s hit the jackpot and fuck it just feels so good to be _touched_ and not fucked into the wall for a change, and it still somehow drives you wild even though it’s completely different from what you thought you wanted out of him. Not the panic or the drama but just. Touching.

 _Oh god._

You have never been so embarrassed. You have to get away before this goes any further. Say something mean. Say something stupid so he’ll say something mean. Smack him and call him names so he’ll give it to you hard and you know what to expect again. _Hurry._ This is stupid. You have to stop it.

But you can’t do anything but arch your back and press into his clever touch, and your stupid blunt nubby left hand is tightening around his shoulder where it has inexplicably appeared, and your right hand is on his right, pressing the fingers flat against your chest and the frantic pulse hammering just beneath the skin, and he can feel how worked up you are and this makes him smirk, a ghost of his old douchebag swagger hiding somewhere behind the blank black stare.

“Pansy,” he says. And _laughs._ That fucking annoying dry snicker that has always driven you shithive maggots. There is no one in the entirety of Paradox Space who can make that noise, and you guess it’s still him in there after all, even without the mood swings and spooky supernatural drama queen bullshit.

It’s the laugh that finally does it. You’re gone with a completely desperate low moan that you will later blame on a weaker, more emotionally vulnerable idiot past version of yourself, and he strokes you through it without any further smartass comments with his other hand flat against your heart and yours on top of it, shaking with something that is not purely physical.

All you can think (when you _can_ think) is that he has really nice fucking hands. And that if this weren’t the actual, literal end of the world, you’d probably enjoy getting to know your best friend. Teammate. Lover. _Whatever_. It's his turn anyway, and you figure there are worse ways to spend the time you have left.

And then it’s back to the snuggling, and eventually he gets sniffly and weepy and instead of smacking him on the side of the head for being a hypocrite and a sissy and going down on him like you would have done in the old days, you tell him it’s going to be all right and you pull away and push him down and finally, tentatively, you begin to touch him back.

Your hands hardly shake.


End file.
